What You Can't Do With Windows Home Server

Attendees at Microsoft's WinHEC conference grilled Windows Home Server executives, trying to determine the limits of the new operating system. Among the banned technologies: Wi-Fi, RAID, and sophisticated power management.

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It's unclear how stringently Microsoft will ask its OEM customers to adhere to its guidelines. In his presentation, Kindel referred to several "banned" technologies, the most interesting of which was a Wi-Fi connection. Instead, Windows Home Servers will be required to connect via Ethernet.

"We looked at the mountains we wanted to climb and we simply made the decision not to address this," Kindel said. "Setting up and configuring wireless without a keyboard or a display, even with technologies like Windows Rally, is a challenging thing."

"We wanted to make it simple," Kindel added. "We assumed our customers would have an empty RJ45 port on the back Will it change over time? Yeah, but in V1 it isn't [there]."

In response to an audience question, Kindel also said that users won't be able to use the box as a home gateway, sniffing traffic into the network and using the built-in firewall to block malicious traffic. The functionality wasn't included into Windows Home Server, Kindel said, primarily because users already own home gateways, which are cheaper and more efficient.

Unfortunately, the ability to the ability to differentiate the platform via software may end up bloating the software with third-party applications, also known as "bloatware" or "crapware". Unfortunately, Kindel said, there was little to do to prevent that, noting that "our position is that it would be detrimental to the category."

Finally, Kindel acknowledged that the design of the software and hardware didn't allow for the fine-grained power management that characterizes all laptops and most desktops, although he didn't go into specifics. The power consumption of the machines has not been disclosed, including whether or not they will contain an internal power supply, or a transformer "brick" like game consoles, such as the Microsoft Xbox 360.

RAID was also on the list of forbidden technologies, since the "mirroring" functions built into some flavors were "too fragile" for the home market, as they often assumed that two drives with identical capacities would be used. Windows Home Servers. The home servers are designed to allow a variety of drives to be installed, Microsoft executives said. If, for some reason, a drive fails, a new drive will have to be inserted and formatted; an existing drive with data can't be repartitioned to add the Windows Home Server OS, Microsoft executives said.

"I think these are going to prove fairly popular," Glaskowsky said of the Windows Home Servers. "Products like Apple's Time Machine [backup software] show that people want cheap, no-hassle media sharing and backup."